Related papers: On Approximate Computation of Critical Points

Many problems of theoretical and practical interest involve finding an optimum over a family of convex functions. For instance, finding the projection on the convex functions in $H^k(\Omega)$, and optimizing functionals arising from some…

We consider a class of multivariate recurrences frequently arising in the worst case analysis of Davis-Putnam-style exponential time backtracking algorithms for NP-hard problems. We describe a technique for proving asymptotic upper bounds…

This paper presents smoothing schemes for obtaining approximate stationary points of unconstrained or linearly-constrained composite nonconvex-concave min-max (and hence nonsmooth) problems by applying well-known algorithms to composite…

Approximations of optimization problems arise in computational procedures and sensitivity analysis. The resulting effect on solutions can be significant, with even small approximations of components of a problem translating into large…

We consider the problem of approximating the reachable set of a discrete-time polynomial system from a semialgebraic set of initial conditions under general semialgebraic set constraints. Assuming inclusion in a given simple set like a box…

Networked discrete dynamical systems are often used to model the spread of contagions and decision-making by agents in coordination games. Fixed points of such dynamical systems represent configurations to which the system converges. In the…

In multi-objective optimization, computing the entire non-dominated set (also known as the Pareto front or the Pareto frontier) is often intractable. However, for any multiplicative factor greater than one, an approximation set can be…

This study presents a novel algorithm for identifying the set of extreme points that constitute the exact convex hull of a point set in high-dimensional Euclidean space. The proposed method iteratively solves a sequence of dynamically…

A fundamental problem in numerical analysis and approximation theory is approximating smooth functions by polynomials. A much harder version under recent consideration is to enforce bounds constraints on the approximating polynomial. In…

We study the general integer programming (IP) problem of optimizing a separable convex function over the integer points of a polytope: $\min \{f(\mathbf{x}) \mid A\mathbf{x} = \mathbf{b}, \, \mathbf{l} \leq \mathbf{x} \leq \mathbf{u}, \,…

Fixpoints are ubiquitous in computer science and when dealing with quantitative semantics and verification one often considers least fixpoints of (higher-dimensional) functions over the non-negative reals. We show how to approximate the…

Many applications require recovering a matrix of minimal rank within an affine constraint set, with matrix completion a notable special case. Because the problem is NP-hard in general, it is common to replace the matrix rank with the…

Let $F \in \R[X_1,\ldots,X_n]$ and the zero set $V=\zero(\mathcal{P},\R^n)$, where $\mathcal{P}:=\{P_1,\ldots,P_s\} \subset \R[X_1,\ldots,X_n]$ is a finite set of polynomials. We investigate existence of critical points of $F$ on an…

In this paper we analyze a class of nonconvex optimization problem from the viewpoint of abstract convexity. Using the respective generalizations of the subgradient we propose an abstract notion proximal operator and derive a number of…

We study a class of projective transformations of spectraplexes associated with self-dual cones and, on this basis, propose a polynomial-time algorithm for convex feasibility problems with positive definite constraints. At each iteration of…

We give a {\em deterministic} algorithm for approximately computing the fraction of Boolean assignments that satisfy a degree-$2$ polynomial threshold function. Given a degree-2 input polynomial $p(x_1,\dots,x_n)$ and a parameter $\eps >…

We extend the concept of polynomial time approximation algorithms to apply to problems for hierarchically specified graphs, many of which are PSPACE-complete. Assuming P != PSPACE, the existence or nonexistence of such efficient…

We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…

A subgradient method is presented for solving general convex optimization problems, the main requirement being that a strictly-feasible point is known. A feasible sequence of iterates is generated, which converges to within user-specified…

We comment on recent results in the field of information based complexity, which state (in a number of different settings), that approximation of infinitely differentiable functions is intractable and suffers from the curse of…